You’re sitting at your desk (at home) and think you smell doog poop, and it turns out you have some on the bottom of your shoe. And you’ve tracked it all over the house.
Ouch.
I try to make sure my “sh*t” only happens at work. But you know it’s going to be a bad day when. . .
. . . when you have a major multi-million-dollar program’s PowerPoint slideshow saved on a network, which you’ll be briefing iin just under 45 minutes. Then you get a network wide email stating the aforementioned network is “down for technical maintenance for an indeterminate amount of time. . .”.
Tripler
And people wonder why I insist on projecting hardcopy slides through the document camera.
When I get an e-mail from a student that starts, “Dear Honoured Sir,” then it’s going to be six paragraphs of a combination of begging, wheedling, and on an extra-bad day, also grovelling.
Here, for instance, is a student who has not submitted any course material and it’s the last day of the term. Will I accept these late submissions? (I will not.) I will be responsible for their failure, it’s the end of the world, &c.
There, as another example, is another student caught red-handed plagiarising. But they worked soooo haaaard. They will be ejected from the country if I do not pass them. They are broke and can not afford to take the course again, etc.
I am not a bitter or spiteful person, I only wish malice on the truly despicable. But somehow, students who barely have the programming skills to manage tying their own shoes fetch up in my fairly advanced course, and so it falls to me–again and again–to have burst their bubbles. It takes a bit of a toll sometimes, it’s the part of the job I really dislike.
I’m supposed to be teaching college-level programming, but apparently I’m also teaching, “These are the conquences of your actions.” I am, in turn, leaning a course called, “How to deal with emotional blackmail.”